Live musical performances provide both visual stimulation, as well as the obvious sound or audible experiences, to the performer and to the audience. Performers often enhance the visual aspects of their live performance with special, visual effects such as lighting displays, stage effects, and even pyrotechnics. Musical artists also employ various components to change or enhance the sound of the instrument being played. This latter aspect of a musical performance has become especially common with the advent of electrically amplified instruments, such as electrical guitars.
Some musical genres, such as the blues, rock and country music, make use of a unique sound generated by a guitar, in which the musician uses an instrument commonly referred to as a guitar slide to contact the strings along the neck of the guitar with one hand while the strings are being picked or strummed over the guitar body, or the pick ups of an electric guitar. Common guitar slides comprise a tube or cylindrical body portion with a hollow interior that is received over one of the fingers of a musician's hand that holds the guitar neck. In this manner of playing, the guitar slide is used to shorten or lengthen the effective vibratory length of the strings, thus changing the sounds emitted. The guitar slide is most often moved either slowly or quickly along the neck toward or away from the guitar body to change the sounds, as desired.